For the website and the server optimization that assists the search engine spiders to crawl and index your site more effectively or to help improve organic rankings, technical search engine optimization is used.
Technical SEO Checklist
To the websites that are displaying certain technical characteristics, including a responsive design, secure connection, or a faster loading time, search engines can give preferential treatment in the search results, and technical SEO is the work that one has to do for making sure that your website does the same.
To make sure that your technical SEO is up to scratch, below you will find a checklist of the important steps you can take. You can help make sure that the security, along with the structure of your site, is meeting the expectations of the algorithms of search engines and are being rewarded in search results in accordance with these guidelines here.
1. Use SSL.
The security technology that creates an encrypted link between a web server and a browser is through the Secure Sockets Layer or SSL. You can easily spot the site using the SSL, which is the website URL started with ‘HTTPS://’ instead of ‘HTTP://.’
Google in 2014 announced that they wished to check out HTTPS everywhere and that securing the HTTPS websites is going to be given the right preference over the non-secure ones in the search results.
It, therefore, makes a lot of sense to make sure that your site is secured one and this can be done through the installation of an SSL certificate over the website though most of the website builders by default include SSL.
2. Ensure your site is mobile-friendly.
A responsive website design can be navigated and read easily on any device as it can adjust itself automatically.
Having a responsive site is a distinctive ranking signal through its algorithms is what Google is clear on. A responsive website is now more important than ever with the introduction of Google’s mobile-first approach to indexing the content.
To make sure that your website is fully responsive and will display in the best format possible for tablet, desktop, or mobile users, it does make a lot of sense here.
3. Speed your site up.
Page speed is considered an important ranking signal as the search engines prefer sites that can load quickly.
The following are the ways in which you can speed up your website:
- Use faster hosting
- Using a fast domain name system or DNS provider.
- Keeping the use of scripts and plugins to a minimum by minimizing the HTTP requests.
- Use a single CSS stylesheet with the code that is used to tell a website browser how to display your website instead of the inline CSS or CSS stylesheets.
- Make sure that the image files are not pixelated and are small as possible.
- Compressing your web pages.
4. Fix duplicate content issues.
Duplicate content can be used to try to manipulate search rankings as well as win more traffic since duplicate content can be confusing to the users.
The search engines are not keen on it, and Google and Bing advise the webmasters to fix the duplicate content issues that they are finding as an outcome here.
5. Create an XML sitemap.
You can think of XML Sitemap as being a search roadmap of sorts that can tell the search engines exactly where their page is as it is a file that can help the search engines to understand your website whilst crawling it.
Each page on your site also contains useful information, and it includes the following:
- The last modification of the page.
- Priority of the page on your site.
- The frequency at which it is updated by your best SEO professional.
6. Consider enabling AMP.
The projects backed by Google aim to speed up the delivery of the content over the smartphones using special code known as AMP HTML is something AMP is.
On your mobile devices, the AMP versions of your web pages load extremely quickly.
All the good things from an SEO point of view are because they load quite fast. Google often highlights the AMP pages in the main carousels in the results of search engines to give you an extensive search bump overall.
7. Adding structured data markup to your website.
The code that you are adding to your website to help the search engines better understand the content on it is through the structured data markup. The search engines index your site more effectively and offer more relevant results through this data here.
Structured data additionally enhances the search results through the addition of the rich snippets, as you can use this structured data for adding the star ratings for reviewing the prices to products or reviewer information.
These enhanced results can thereby improve your click-through rates and generate additional traffic to your site as they are visually more appealing and highlight immediate useful information to its searchers. It is worth making an effort for the addition of structured data to your site as the sites with the results featuring higher CTRs are generally considered to receive preferential treatment in the search engines.
More to Read: Why PPC Ads are better than Facebook Ads
8. Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools site registration.
The free tools from Google and Microsoft, respectively allowing you to submit your website to their search engines for indexing is through the Google Search Consoles and Bing Webmaster Tools.
You should be submitting its XML sitemap to both Google Search Console and Webmaster Tools so that they can crawl your new site and start to display results from it in search results is when you are ready to launch your website.
You can now check out the general performance of your website from the viewpoint of the search engines also different things ways you can use the tools, including the following:
- testing the usability of the site
- accessing the search analytics
- checking the backlinks to your site
and many more.
